Realizing Social Science Knowledge: The Political Realization of Social Science Knowledge and Research: Toward New Scenarios [1st ed.] 978-3-7051-0003-9;978-3-662-41492-7

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages 1-8
Introduction (B. Holzner, K. D. Knorr, H. Strasser)....Pages 9-11
In Memoriam Paul F. Lazarsfeld Paul F. Lazarsfeld and the Institutionalization of Empirical Social Research (P. Neurath)....Pages 13-26
Front Matter ....Pages 27-27
Scientific Explanation and Human Emancipation (R. Bhaskar)....Pages 29-51
Objectivity and Endurance: On Some Evaluative Criteria for Social Science Knowledge (R. Reichardt)....Pages 52-63
Some Issues in the Real Use of Science (J. O’Neill)....Pages 64-70
Front Matter ....Pages 71-71
Accounts and Action: The Logic(s) of Social Science and Pragmatic Knowledge (Nico Steht, W. Baldamus)....Pages 73-79
The Emergence of Combat Anthropology in France: A Study in the Production and Utilization of Social Science Knowledge (Michael Hammond)....Pages 79-92
Social Knowledge for Social Policy (Samuel Z. Klausner)....Pages 93-121
Front Matter ....Pages 163-163
Sociology — Decyphering “Zeitgeist”, Creating Consciousness or Cooperating to “Solve Problems”? (Leopold Rosenmayr)....Pages 125-146
Beyond Figure-Ground and Context (Marc T. De Mey)....Pages 147-157
Social Science and Practical Knowledge: Toward New Paradigms (Marina Fischer-Kowalski)....Pages 158-161
Front Matter ....Pages 163-163
Research in the Service of Social Reform: The Politics of Designing Systems of Knowledge Production and Use (Evelyn M. Fisher)....Pages 165-178
Conceptions of Science (J. M. Ziman)....Pages 179-196
Societal Development and Social Research (Hermann Strasser)....Pages 197-198
Front Matter ....Pages 199-199
Three Terms in Search of Reconceptualization: Knowledge, Utilization, and Decision-Making (Carol H. Weiss)....Pages 201-219
Making, Relaying, and Using Knowledge (Robert F. Rich)....Pages 220-235
Construing Knowledge Use (Gerald Zaltman)....Pages 236-251
Front Matter ....Pages 253-253
Knowledge Conversion and Utilization (Nathan Caplan)....Pages 255-264
Implementation Structures: A New Unit of Administrative Analysis (Benny Hjern, David O. Porter)....Pages 265-277
Front Matter ....Pages 279-279
The Dissemination and Use of Educational R & D in the United States: An Analysis of Recent Federal Attempts to Improve Educational Practice (Michael B. Kane, A. Thel Kocher)....Pages 281-294
Use of Social Science Knowledge and Data in Public Policy Making: The Deliberations on the Compensatory Educational Policy by U.S. Congress (Vijai P. Singh)....Pages 295-305
Knowledge Utilization and State Agencies: Some Remarks (Kurt W. Rothschild)....Pages 306-308
Front Matter ....Pages 309-309
The Nature of Information Utilization in Local Organizations (Judith K. Larsen)....Pages 311-326
The Utilization of Social Science Knowledge in Studying Technology and Society: The Case of the Accident at Three Mile Island (David L. Sills)....Pages 327-336
Back Matter ....Pages 337-337

Citation preview

Realizing Social Science Knowledge

Institut ftir Hohere Studien -Institute for Advanced Studies IRS-Studies No. 3

realizing social science knowledge Th.e Political Realization of Social Science Knowledge and Research: Toward New Scenarios

A Symposium in Memoriam Paul F. Lazarsfeld

Edited by B. Holzner, K.D. Knorr, and H. Strasser

Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg GmbH 1983

CIP-Kurztitelaufnahme der Deutschen Bibliothek Realizing social science knowledge : the polit. realization of social science knowledge and research: toward new scenarios I a Symposium in Memoriam Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Hrsg. von B. Holzner ... - Wien ; Wiirzburg : Physica-Verlag, 1983. (IHS studies ; No. 3) NE: Holzner, Burkart [Hrsg.); Symposium in Memoriam Paul F. Lazarsfeld ; Institut fUr Hohere Studien und Wissenschaftliche Forschung : IHS studies

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the permission of the publisher. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1983 Originally published by Physica-Verlag Ges.m.b.H., Vienna in 1983. ISBN 978-3-7051-0003-9 ISBN 978-3-662-41492-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-662-41492-7 Composed and printed by repro-druck ,Journalfranz" Arnulf Liebing GmbH+ Co., Wiirzburg. GefOrdert durch das Bundesministerium flir Wissenschaft und Forschung in Wien.

Preface

This book is the outcome of an International Conference on "The Political Realization of Social Science Knowledge" organized by the editors of this volume at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, June 18-20, 1980. The original idea of holding the conference was suggested by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, who in his role as a scientific advisor and almost permanent visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies has urged us to bring together scholars from Europe and North America to confront the problem which was perhaps foremost on his scholarly mind: the theoretical, methodological, and empirical problem of the applicability and the actual application of the social sciences. His initial activities in market research in his Vienna years of the late 1920's and early 1930's provide as much testimony as his last book published in 1975: An Introduction to Applied Sociology [Lazarsfeld, P.F., and J.F. Reitz. With the collaboration of A.K. Pasanella. New York 1975]. As a consequence, when the Institute for Advanced Studies decided to fmance the conference in memoriam PFL, the meeting was designed to assess the present state of political realization of social science knowledge and to advance our theoretical understanding of the problems and processes involved in knowledge utilization. As the number of original papers presented at the conference suggests, the response was enthusiastic and the interest in this subject was great. Although the Conference Proceedings do not include all papers for the simple reason of space limitations imposed by the publisher, they reflect the structure of the meeting in which several theoretically distinctive foci of discussion emerged. By focusing on issues of knowledge application, the present volume represents a kind of counterpart to the recently published "Papers in Honor of Paul F. Lazarsfeld" [Merton, R.K., J.S. Coleman, and P.H. Rossi (eds.): Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research. New York 1979] which are devoted to the whole range of PFL's sociological and methodological endeavors. The papers contained in these Proceedings have been revised for publication after the conference. Alvin W. Gouldner's presentation "Is Amnesia in Sociology Discontinuity?" in the opening session which had provided a great deal of literary and scientific stimulation, could not be included here as his sudden death on December 15, 1980, did not permit him to finish the paper in the way he had planned for the Proceedings. In the case of those papers which had been published elsewhere in the meantime, the editors did not find it too hard to exclude them from this publication: Coleman, J.S.: The Structure of Society and the Nature of Social Research. Knowledge 1 (3), 1980, 333-350. Cook, T.D., J. Levinson-Rose, and W.E. Pollard: The Misutilization of Evaluation Research Findings: Contributions from Dissemination Processes. Knowledge 1 ( 4), 1980, 477-498.

6

Preface

Dunn: W.N.: Experiment and Argument: Metaphors of Reform in the Applied Social Sciences. Knowledge 3 (2), 1982 (forthcoming). Ke", D.H : Knowledge Utilization: Epistemological and Political Assumptions. Knowledge 2 (4), 1981,483-501. Nelkin, D.: Forbidden Research: Limits to Inquiry in the Social Sciences. Ethical Issues in Social Science Research. Ed. by T.L. Beecham. Baltimore 1982, 163-174. Pollak, M: Paul F. Lazarsfeld: A Sociointellectual Biography. Knowledge 2 (2), 1980, 157-177. A revised and somewhat different version of Marin's paper also appeared in Knowledge, while revised versions of Phillips' and Ritzer's papers have in the meantime become parts of books that the authors published seperately. However, we would like to direct the attention of the interested reader to all papers which could not be included here, mainly for the reason of rather strict space limitations on the part of the publisher:

Gouldner, A. W.: Is Amnesia in Sociology Discontinuity, and the Problem of Permeable Boundaries in Culture. Phillips, D.L.: Social Theory and Moral Values. Ritzer, G.: The Politics of Inter-Paradigmatic Conflict in Sociology. Hove, E. van: Sociology as a Practice. Waele, P. de: The Eclipse of Personology as an Artefact of Institutionalization. Aichholzer, G.: Utilization Determinants in Social Science Contract Research: Three Case Studies. Schmidt, G., andJ. Braczyk: The Humanization of Work and Industrial Sociology. Kreutz, H: On the Relationship between Knowledge Application andUniversity Education: Some Empirical Data. Lamser, V. : A Design of the Systematization of Applied Sociology. Discussant papers specifically prepared for the meeting are included in full length, i.e., they also refer to papers presented in the conference but left out here; we have not included those discussant contributions which were of an ad-hoc character (K. Knorr, N. Luhmann, B. Holzner, H. Nowotny, and P. Weingart). We owe great debt to Paul F. Lazarsfeld for "bringing it all about" and to the Institute for Advanced Studies and its directors Professor Rapoport and Dr. Fiirst, as well as to the National Science Foundation for "letting it happen." We have profited enormously from the Conference Secretariat of Hannelore Loos and her assistant, Waltraud Raidl, without whose help we would probably not have ventured to organize the meeting in the first place. We are also grateful to the University of Pittsburgh's Program for the Study of Knowledge Use for its help in raising travel funds, and to Linda Hudak of the University Center for International Studies for editing and rewriting the papers of the volume. Most of all, we thank the authors of this volume and the participants in the conference for contributing their time and effort to the conference and the Proceedings. Burkart Holzner Karin D. Knorr Hermann Strasser

December 1, 1981

Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

5

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9

Neurath, P.: In Memoriam Paul F. Lazarsfeld: Paul F. Lazarsfeld and the Institutionalization of Empirical Social Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

13

Section I: Epistemological Issues on Knowledge Utilization Bhaskar, R.: Scientific Explanation and Human Emancipation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reichardt, R.: Objectivity and Endurance: On Some Evaluative Criteria for Social Science Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O'Neill, J. (discussant): Some Issues in the Real Use of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

29 52 64

Section II: Conceptions of Science in Relation to Practice Stehr, N., and W. Baldamus: Accounts and Action: The Logic(s) of Social Science and Pragmatic Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hammond, M: The Emergence of Combat Anthropology in France: A Study in the Production and Utilization of Social Science Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Klausner, S.Z.: Social Knowledge for Social Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

73 79 93

Section III: Social Science and Practical Knowledge: Toward New Paradigms Rosenmayr, L. : Sociology - Decyphering "Zeitgeist", Creating Consciousness or Cooperating to "Solve Problems"? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 De Mey, M T.: Beyond Figure-Ground and Context. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Fischer-Kowalski, M (discussant): Social Science and Practical Knowledge: Toward New Paradigms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

Section IV: Societal Development and Social Research Fisher, E.M: Research in the Service of Social Reform: The Politics of Designing Systems of Knowledge Production and Use. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Ziman, J.M: Conceptions of Science. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Strasser, H (discussant): Societal Development and Social Research. . . . . . . . . . . 197

Section V: Conceptual Foundations on Knowledge Use I Weiss, CH: Three Terms in Search of Reconceptualization: Knowledge, Utilization and Decision-Making. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

8

Contents

Rich, F. : Making, Relaying, and Using Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 Zaltman, G. : Construing Knowledge Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 Section VI: Conceptual Foundations on Knowledge Use II Caplan, N.: Knowledge Conversion and Utilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 Hjern, B., and D.O. Porter: Implementation Structures: A New Unit of Administrative Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Section VII: Knowledge Utilization and State Agencies

Kane, M.B., and A. T. Kocher: The Dissemination and Use of Educational R & D in the United States: An Analysis of Recent Federal Attempts to Improve Educational Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281 Singh, V.P.: Use of Social Science Knowledge and Data in Public Policy Making: The Deliberations on the Compensatory Educational Policy by U.S. Congress. . . 295 Rothschild, K. W. (discussant): Knowledge Utilization and State Agencies: Some Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 Section VIII: Dimensions of Knowledge Utilization in Practice

Larsen, J.K. : The Nature of Information Utilization in Local Organizations . . . . . . 311 Sills, D.L.: The Utilization of Social Science Knowledge in Studying Technology and Society: The Case of the Accident at Three Mile Island. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327

Introduction In recent years, problems of knowledge use in the social sciences and questions of the relationship between social science and public policy making have been a prominent topic of discussions which range from epistemological controversies about the nature of the social sciences to debates over the fruitfulness of single programs and proposed social reforms, for example in education. The conference on which the present volume is based was designed to arrive at a reformulation of some of the key questions in this discussion grounded in the experience accumulated in the last two decades, and broadened by relevant illustrations from the past and from the natural and technological sciences. In particular, the goal of the conference has been threefold: 1. The advancement and critique of theoretical concepts and models of knowledge utilization in regard to the use (or misuse) of social science research in policy making. 2. The discussion of scenarios of knowledge utilization derived from case studies of past and present programs or projects designed to achieve organizational and social reform. 3. An assessment of the role of social science knowledge and research in present socioeconomic systems based upon an evaluation of socio-economic trends and historical evidence. In the past, models and concepts of knowledge utilization have been dominated by the "two-communities perspective" which attributes many of the difficulties of social science knowledge use to the distinctive characteristics of the scientific community on the one hand and the political system on the other hand. This concept has suggested that improved communication may be the remedy for the "gap" between knowledge and policy, as also intimated by Lazarsfeld. A first attempt in this direction was made when two of the present editors organized an International Conference on "Determinants and Controls of Scientific Development some eight years ago, though clearly with a focus on the production side of knowledge [cf. Kno"/Strasser/Zilian; Strasser/Kno"]. However, it may well be, as Coleman succinctly demonstrated in his paper, that in the wake of a shift in the structure of political responsibility for solving social problems from the private and local to the public and national level in most industrialized countries, a new kind of focus in reflecting upon scientific development had been brought about: thinking about the side of knowledge use. Our first goal mentioned above has therefore been to broaden and at the same time refine the "two-communities" perspective and to confront it with alternative models of knowledge realization (see also Section 3, this volume). However, it is clear that detached theoretical discussions which abstract from the empirical conditions of knowledge use need to be supplemented by success (and failure) stories of single cases of attempted knowledge utilization, which trace in detail the problems and processes of implementing social research. Finally, it is clear that the role of social science knowledge in political action will change depending on the specific political context in which a knowledge system is

10

Introduction

placed. Consequently, studies which analyze the historical "situatedness" of social research over time and which link specific social science achievements in knowledge utilization to specific economic, political or social conditions have been called for in this effort to improve our understanding of knowledge and policy (see Section 4, this volume). The broad variety of viewpoints and approaches represented in the contributions to the conference and to this volume reflects the variety of notions and perspectives which play a role in the ongoing discussion of knowledge and policy. Yet out of this variety, three questions have emerged at the conference which may well orient to a significant degree future empirical and theoretical research on knowledge use. The first is the question of political decision-making which has lost none of its significance since the beginning of research on the political utilization of knowledge. The discussion included in this volume points in the direction of a transition from individualistic, decision-oriented models to models which start from the socially accomplished, negotiatied character of the selections taken by political actors, and which begin to grope with the situational rationality that apparently marks the (social) process of deciding (see Sections 5 and 6, this volume). The second question refers to a notion of knowledge which conceives of the production of knowledge as a social process in which practical and political criteria may influence research decisions (see Sections 1 and 2, this volume). Direct observation of science at work suggests that the process of production of knowledge is constrnctive rather than descriptive or normative, and that the products of research are structured in terms of several levels of selection generated in fields of action which transcend the community of scientists to include political, administrative, and other practical actors [Kno"-Cetina]. Our rethinking of the problem of knowledge utilization will have to address not only the question of political decision making, but also the question of knowledge production with a view to utilization. Finally, there is the question of a reconception of the processes which connect (or separate) social science research and practical application. Two attempts in this direction strike us as particularly promising: the attempts to conceive of knowledge realization in analogy to the symbolically mediated process of judgement and argumentation which takes place in court, within a context of multiple interests, rules, and sanctions. The second suggestion takes the transformation processes which knowledge undergoes when it enters practial scenes of action as its starting point. These processes have been suggested by contributions to Sections 5 and 6 (this volume), HolznerfMarx [1979] and others, and will have to be given much more attention in research on utilization. As emphasized by the concluding conference panel, these basic questions currently culminate in problems that arise from the bureaucratic organization of the use of social and other knowledge. What are we to do if, as one panelist questioned, bureaucracies all over one's country ask us to think about how we, as scientists and citizens, could be better manipulated? Science has manouvered itself into a dilemma: If we postulate that the production (and producers) of knowledge ought to take control over its utilization, we are possibly confronted with the fact that the traditional knowledge using systems are capable of generating their own knowledge on a scale thus far unknown. However, the dissolution of theoretical dilemmas is as much a part of the scientist's business as his contribution to the solution of practical problems.

Introduction

11

References

Holzner, B., and!. Marx: Knowledge Application. The Knowledge System in Society. Boston 1979.

Knorr-Cetina, K.: The Manufacture of Knowledge. An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford 1981.

Kno", K., H. Strasser, and H. G. Zilian (eds.): Determinants and Controls of Scientific Development. Dordrecht-Boston 1975.

Strasser, H., and K. Kno" (eds.): Wissenschaftssteuerung: Soziale Prozesse der Wissenschaftsentwicklung. Frankfurt a.M.-New York 1976.

Realizing Social Science Knowledge. 1983 © Physica-Verlag, Wien-Wiirzburg.

In Memoriam Paul F. Lazarsfeld Paul F. Lazarsfeld and the Institutionalization of Empirical Social Research By P. Neurath, New York 1 )

It seems altogether fitting that a conference on "The Political Realization of Social Science Knowledge and Research" be dedicated to the memory of Paul F. Lazarsfeld, because during the last decades of his life this theme was so close to his heart and so central to his work that, were he still alive, he would undoubtedly stand today in front of us as one of the main speakers of this gathering. That it takes place at this Institute for Advanced Studies, in whose creation in the early 1960s he took such a decisive part, adds to the poignancy of the moment. I was told by friends that when the sad news of his death on August 30, 1976 spread at the annual convention of the American Sociological Association, then in session in New York, it cast a momentary pall over the meetings and that it took a while until its hum came back to its normal level. For the youngest among those present, either still students or recent graduates from many universities he was hardly more than one of those great names that one learns about in one's courses and about whom one never quite knows: are they still with us or are they already gone. But for the older ones, including several hundred who had been his own students in three and one-half decades of teaching at Columbia and elsewhere, and especially for those, who had been at Columbia in the 1940s and 1950s, he was part and symbol of that exciting period when under the leadership of Lazarsfeld and Merton the new combination of Social Theory and Empirical Social Research began to change the face and the meaning of sociology for generations of its practitioners first in America and then in Europe as well. The exhilaration and excitement of that period is perhaps best caught in the words of some of their former students who later became themselves important representatives of that new combination. Thus Selvin [1975], recalling those heady days in his piece in the Festschrift for Merton a few years ago compares the two of them, Lazarsfeld and Merton, to "a giant double star, each strengthened in the other's radiance, and all of us basked in their combined illumination." Seymour Lipset, more politically inclined and therefore also more attached to Robert S. Lynd, speaks of a "Troika" that in those days dominated the Department: Lynd was the saint, the moralist, who set the goals; Merton was the theologian or theorist, his lectures illustrated the pQwer of sociology to analyze, to illustrate areas of socie1 )Paul Neurath,

144-16 Jewel Avenue, Flushing, Long Island, New York, NY 11367, U.S.A.

14

P. Neurath

ty; Lazarsfeld was the organizer, the Paul or Brigham Young, who showed how to do it, how to organize research and analyze data. He seemed like the practical man [Lipset]. That Lipset brings in Lynd has a deeper meaning for what I am going to talk about, because during Lazarsfeld's earlier years in America, it was Lynd who in crisis after crisis turned up as his guardian angel. In a more personal vein David Sills, in his obituary of Paul Lazarsfeld in "Columbia Today," recalls Lazarsfeld as ... our teacher, boss, colleague, critic, and- so we hoped- our friend. We joked endlessly about his impossible work habits, his outrageous demands upon our time, his nearly impenetrable Viennese accent, his ever-present cigar, his comments during hurried taxi rides downtown, his making three appointments for lunch at the Faculty Club, and keeping them all by skillful tablehopping, and his ability to juggle a dozen projects and research assistants simultaneously [Sills]. But then, after mentioning several of Lazarsfeld's former students who had meanwhile become important sociologists in their own right, Sills ends by saying: "Each (one of us) has learned what sociology is or could be about from the genius of this warm, ebullient, often maddening and almost unbelievable ex-Viennese. We know it, and we are thankful" [Sills]. In the end, Robert Merton, his friend and collaborator for 35 years, summarized it all by saying at the memorial service in St. Paul's Chapel at Columbia University in December 1976, "If it were not for Paul, we would all not be here"- meaning thereby not only that we, over three hundred of us, had come to honor the memory of a great man and friend, but also that without the work of Paul Lazarsfeld many of those fields and subfields of sociology would not exist, in which most of those present exercised their professions; fields like mass communication, the detailed study of voting behavior, systematic market research and many others. The work of Paul Lazarsfeld, his influence upon the development of modern sociology is too big and too variegated to be encompassed within one short speech within thenarrow time limit at my disposal. Thus I have decided to limit my remarks mainly to the one aspect of his work that I consider the most important and the most influential of all that he has done. That is his historic role in the institutionalization of empirical social research, that became the basis not only for most of his other work but also for the great change first of American, then of European, Sociology from its pre-war to its post-war shape. Bowing to the genius loci I shall thereby particularly stress his early beginnings in Vienna until 1933, the year when he left for America, because these earlier parts of his development are perhaps less well known to you than the later ones. Paul Lazarsfeld was born here in Vienna in 1901. His father was a lawyer - a rather unsuccessful one moneywise, so he tells us which let the son decide quite early that he himself would never want to become a lawyer nor any other free professional, so that he would not have to spend his days chasing after clients and administering his own office. Which sounds strangely ironic in retrospect when we remember how these very two aspects became later on the bane of his own professional life: keeping after the administration of his own institutes and chasing after clients to keep those institutes going.

In Memoriam Paul F. Lazarsfeld

15

His mother was a psychologist, a student of Alfred Adler, but without any formal professional training. She became widely known through her book Wie die Frau den Mann erlebt, published in 1931. It became important for young Lazarsfeld's later life that already before the first World War the leading intellectuals of the Austrian Social-Democratic party were regular guests at the Lazarsfeld family home: Victor Adler, then the head of the party; his son Friedrich Adler, later the first Secretary of the Socialist International; Otto Bauer, Karl Renner, Rudolf Hilferding, Robert Danneberg, Karl Seitz and others. After Friedrich Adler had in October 1916 assassinated the Austrian Prime Minister Count Stuergkh, in order to create with the subsequent court trial a forum for voicing his own and his party friends' anti-war sentiments, which up to then Count Stuergkh had pre· vented by practically dictatorial means, young Lazarsfeld then barely 16 years old, partie· ipated in demonstrations for Adler and against the war both inside and outside the court room. On one such occasion he even was arrested. Together with his mother he visited Adler several times in jail. Lazarsfeld tells how several years later, when he did not quite know which field to choose for study at the university, a letter that Friedrich Adler had written to him still from jail, and while Lazarsfeld was still in Gymnasium, eventually decided the issue. Adler, himself a physicist and mathematician, had advised the boy to keep up his studies of mathematics, for which he had shown some talent, because knowing mathematics would always give him a great advantage. Thus he did indeed study mathematics, graduating in 1925 with a dissertation "Ober die Perihelbewegung des Merkur aus der Einstein'schen Gravitationstheorie" [Lazarsfeld, 1925]. After which, following his earlier decision never to become a free professional, he headed for the security of a civil service position by becoming a teacher of mathematics and physics in a Vienna Gymnasium. Meanwhile he had, in the early days of the new republic, in 1919, together with his friend Ludwig Wagner founded the Vereinigung Sozialistischer Mittelschi.iler. Beginning in 1924 they organized together summer and winter camps for socialistic youths, especially Mittelschi.iler. There they introduced all sorts of educational innovations, all in the direction of educating the new socialist man for the new socialist society. After their first summer camp in 1924 they published a lengthy report about it called "Gemeinschaftserziehung durch Erziehungsgemeinschaften" [Lazarsfeld/Wagner]. They were all of 23 years old at that time. Through these educational activities, Lazarsfeld became first acquainted with the psychologist Siegfried Bemfeld (who later wrote "Sysiphus oder die Grenzen der Erziehung") and through him he began to attend lectures by Professors Karl and Charlotte Biihler who had not long before been called from Wtirzburg to the University of Vienna and had founded here the new Psychological Institute. It was part of the political climate of the time that young socialist intellectuals were very much interested in psychology and psychoanalysis, for similar reasons as Lazarsfeld himself. They read large quantities of Freud, went to the public lectures of Alfred Adler and flocked into any university lectures that were different from the very conservative traditional psychology. That brought many of them into the Biihler seminar.

16

P. Neurath

There finally the two strands in Lazarsfeld's life were woven together: his knowledge of mathematics and his interest in psychology, the latter especially under his socialist point of view. At a public meeting he had listened to Otto Felix Kanitz, one of the leaders of the young socialist workers, who had cited a few very impressive answers about their downtrodden lives, culled from an inquiry comprising some 2,000 questionnaires. After the meeting he asked Kanitz, "But why don't you count those answers?" Kanitz sounded somewhat baffled but loaned Lazarsfeld the questionnaires and he did some "counting." The result he presented in a paper at the Biihler seminar [Lazarsfeld et al., p. 157]. Impressed by his, for that time, still unusual handling of the statistical analysis, Charlotte Biihler appointed him as her assistant to teach her students the first elements of statistics and of data analysis. Friedrich Adler's prediction of almost ten years before had come true. Lazarsfeld's first two books and a number of articles resulted from his work with Charlotte Biihler: In 1929 he wrote his "Statistisches Praktikum ftir Psychologen und Lehrer," the first statistics text in German for these two groups [Lazarsfeld, 1929]. In 1931 he in part wrote and in part edited "Jugend und Beruf," for the most part papers from the Biihler seminar dealing with the occupational choice of young workers and related topics [Lazarsfeld, et al.]. The next major step is well known from Lazarsfeld 's [ 1968] memoir. By 1927 he wanted to go full time into the university but, not having any means of his own, he could not give up his position as Gymnasium teacher without first finding another source of income. In this somewhat difficult situation he literally invented what later became the first step towards the institutionalization of empirical social research: With the permission and active help of the Biihlers he established a small research institute called the Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle, set up as a private organization, that could accept commercial and other non-university research to fmance the necessary minimum salaries for himself and his co-workers. At the same time it could, of course, do any kind of university-type research in applied psychology, etc. It was linked to the university in several ways. Karl Biihler was its president, while Lazarsfeld, its director, remained at the same time as assistant to Charlotte Biihler. A number of famous professors served on the advisory board. To the world of business and industry, it was linked in that the heads of the Chamber of Commerce (Handelskammer), the Chamber of Workers (Arbeiterkammer) of Vienna and of the Chamber of Agriculture for Lower Austria were members of the presidium, while a whole galaxy of well known industrialists joined the professors as members of the advisory board [Lazars[eld, 1968, p. 286;Zeisel, 3-12]. 2 ) Most of the employees of the Forschungsstelle -all of them working part-time -were Lazarsfeld's own students at the Biihler seminar. That created an interesting kind of symbiosis: any new methods or interesting psychological or other results were immediately discussed in the seminar while questions raised there were every so often checked against 2 ) They included Professor Ludwig Mises (Economics), Oscar Morgenstern and Richard Strigl (Business Cycle Institute), Professor Otto Poetzl (Psychiatry) and such business leaders as Paul Gemgross, Manfred Mautner·Markhof and others.

In Memoriam Paul F. Lazarsfeld

17

actual data at the Forschungsstelle. Numerous seminar papers and quite a number of doctoral dissertations resulted from this symbiosis. The Forschungsstelle did then indeed all sorts of commercial market research about the consumption of tea, coffee, chocolate, shirts, shoes, and what not - but always with a heavy psychological slant. One of their non-commercial studies concerned the relation between occupation and choice of courses by the students of an adult educational institution, the Wiener Volkshochschule [Radermacher/Smith, 100-106]. In an interview for the West German Radio in 1978 [Greffrath], Marie Jahoda recalls a study of the lifestyle of beggars in Vienna; or one where, during the war in Ethiopia in 1936, they had people draw that country into an outline map of Africa (which for most of them then promptly made up three-quarters of that continent) "with interesting implications about what constitutes 'public knowledge' " -entirely non-commercial studies for which they did not get a penny and which they had to conduct out of their own enthusiasm. But in commercial studies too they came up with socially relevant findings, e.g., when they developed the concept of the "proletarian" versus the "middle class consumer" [Greffrath ]. If today politically minded students ask: "How could these young socialists waste their time and sell their souls for cheap commercial studies, why did they not engage in more socially relevant investigations?" then an old timer like myself can only smile at the naivite of the question. In those days there was practically no money available for any non-commercial studies -there existed as yet none of the latter-day government or private foundations. And after the Great Depression began, the little money they got for interviewing and tabulating became for quite a number of the co-workers the only income they had. Should they have turned it down because those interviews were not socially relevant? Or should the Forschungsstelle itself, meaning Lazarsfeld, have turned down those commercial studies, which would in fact have meant to close down again the only place in Vienna that could with some regularity produce at least some socially relevant studies, financed for the most part with money scrounged out from the commercial ones? In the same interview, 1978 for the West German Radio Marie Jahoda was still asked whether they didn't in those days feel any scruples about all that commercial work they were doing, and whether they did not, as did the latter-day radicals in the 1960s, discuss this problem of "science in the service of capital?" To which Marie Jahoda could only answer: " ... many of us had no other income ... we had among our interviewers people with doctorates in Law and Economics ... for whom this was their income. That was in that time, that was so horrible in Austria, especially for young people, so much of a justification that we did not have any time left for having a bad conscience" [Greffrath, p. 120]. But now for the other important strand in the fabric: being for the most part ardent young socialists, they knew each other not only as fellow students at the Bi.ihler seminar but also as members of their various socialist student and other organizations. That led to a completely non-bureaucratic work-style and a kind of team work that was altogether novel at least in the social sciences: with a minimum of formal hierarchy but, where needed, a maximum of voluntary subordination and a tremendous amount of dedication

18

P. Neurath

to their work, as they were used to it from their socialistic organizations. That led at times to extraordinary performances especially when sudden deadlines were to be met, even when little or no money was around. Because all of it was based not on their little pay or on any diffuse "loyalty to the firm," but on the common political engagement of those concerned. As Marie Jahoda put it later: " ... the Forschungsstelle could only exist on the basis that a great number of young intellectuals were unemployed. It was a circle of friends, not a commercial enterprise ... It was grandiose and quite unsystematic in this respect (money and budget, P.N.), more an expression of our interest in social science and in politics" [Greffrath, p. 118]. It was this type of informal internal organization and work-style that, together with the altogether novel form of external organization as a para-university research institution, that Lazarsfeld later on transplanted so successfully to America and that became eventually the most widely imitated pattern in similar university and para-university institutions all over America. The most famous work of the Forschungsstelle became, of course, "Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal" [lahoda/Lazarsfeld/Zeisel, 1933]. Its contents and methods are by now too well known to need description at this point. But its pre-history may be of interest: Lazarsfeld and his co-workers were always on the look-out for opportunities to do studies in line with their own political ideology. When they came across the newer American and before those the older British soci3.1. surveys, they wanted to do something similar. For a topic they got what seemed to them a very bright idea: with the revolution of 1918 -then only 12 years back- the workers had gained the 8-hour day {then still within a 48-hour week). It might be useful to study how they spent their newly-won leisure time. Perhaps one could help them to utilize it better. When they suggested this to Otto Bauer, he almost hit the ceiling over so much naivite and lack of a sense of reality. The year was 1930 and the Big Depression was in full swing. "Leisure time you want to study when, what the workers need is work time? Why don't you study unemployment?" He even told them where to study it: in Marienthal, only 25 km south of Vienna, a one-factory town, once the biggest textile mill in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, with in its haydays 1200 employees [Greffrath, p. 122]. Now, with the factory closed down and even dismantled, practically the whole town lived under truly frightful conditions on what little unemployment or welfare relief there was. He even helped them in getting a small subsidy for their study from the Wiener Arbeiterkarnmer. The rest is history. Today every student of sociology has to know about the book. Of late a group of young enthusiasts is producing a video documentary and a new survey about Marienthal that combines the recollections of some of the old timers about the situation in 1930 with some of its new problems in 1980. Marienthal also became a milestone in Lazarsfeld's personal life. In 1932 Charlotte BUhler sent him to an International Congress of Psychology to give a paper on it that attracted the attention ofleading American psychologists [Lazarsfeld, 1932]. When later on he needed contacts in America, they were among those who were able to hand him around. The next step is again well known from his memoir of 1968: The European representative of the Rockefeller Foundation noticed him both through his market research and

In Memoriam Paul F. Lazarsfeld

19

through the Marienthal study and offered him a one-year travelling fellowship to America to see how these things were being done there. When he arrived in New York in October 1933, one of his first visits was to Robert Lynd at Columbia, to meet the famous author of "Middletown." Lynd worked then on a study of upper middle class unemployment, meaning mostly business managers in Montclair, New Jersey- a somewhat unusual wrinkle in the general genre of unemployment studies. Lazarsfeld offered to help as a volunteer in organizing and analyzing the data. Lynd could not bring himself to accept the offer for fear that he would thereby exploit the young man. But he allowed him to join him for a while as teaching assistant in his course on social research, similar to his position with Charlotte Biihler in Vienna. This proved later on to have been one of the most momentous encounters in Lazarsfeld's life. In his memoir he tells in detail how he spent his first year as travelling fellow visiting any number of places where empirical social research, market research or unemployment research was being conducted: How after the Civil War in Austria in February 1934 and the establishment of the fascist regime under Dollfuss his family and his friends were all arrested -his parents incidentally for having hidden for a few days Helene Bauer, the wife of Otto Bauer; and how, having nothing to expect but being also arrested if he came back, he asked the Rockefeller Foundation to extend his fellowship for another year, which was granted. Towards the end of his second year he made up his mind to stay in America permanently. He went briefly back to Austria to order his affairs and to obtain a regular immigration visa. He got that on the strength of a job promised to him by David Craig in Pittsburgh for whom he had done some volunteer work in market research [Craig/Lazarsfeldj. But by the time Lazarsfeld arrived in New York in October 1935, Craig had left his own position in Pittsburgh and with that the promised job had dissolved into thin air. In this rather desperate situation Lynd came to the rescue and got him a job with the Federal Youth Administration in New Jersey. It had two aspects: One was to supervise, meaning in fact to invent employment for unemployed youngsters and the other was to organize and analyze some 10,000 questionnaires that they had collected and turned over for analysis to the newly founded University of Newark. Lazarsfeld combined the two tasks by hiring unemployed students to do the sorting and tabulating of those 10,000 questionnaires - in those days before mechanized equipment a formidable task that, to his great relief, kept them occupied for quite some time. But he also prevailed upon the university to establish a little research institute with himself as director, where this huge tabulating work could take place. This was again set up as a private organization with some support from the university - space in an abandoned brewery - and half of his own salary, for which he in turn taught several courses at the university - and with the right to take on contract research, commercial or otherwise. The other half of his own salary and the money for his workers came to begin with from the Youth Administration, later on from commercial research- including a highly psychological study for the New York Milk Board on why young people don't like to drink

20

P. Neurath

milk [Brown/Lazarsfeld] 3 ) - or from work for the Essex County school board (Essex County Superintendent of Schools and the Research Center 1938), or any place else that was willing to part with money for research. As Rose Goldsen, Lazarsfeld's secretary through the Newark and the early New York years recalled it later at the 20-year anniversary of the institute in 1957: How were we supported? Hans Zeisel, on the occasion of Paul's fiftieth birthday celebration mentioned ... that the financial structure of social research, as we know it, had been laid down in the early days of the Vienna Institute. I am now going to give a name to this Viennese fiscal principle - the cliffhanging principle of finance. We were all cliff hangers in those days. Those were the days of depression ... as a result, Paul Lazarsfeld spent his days peddling to potential "marks" the idea of hiring us to do research for them. Research on anything ... The next steps are fairly well known. In 1937 the Rockefeller Foundation wanted to have a two-year study done about the social consequences of radio. The project was located at Princeton with the psychologist Hadley Cantril and Frank Stanton, then audience research director at CBS, as nominal directors. The actual directorship had been offered to several senior people, but none of them dared in that depression time to leave his university for two years. When Lynd heard of this he suggested Lazarsfeld who had done the first major radio audience survey ever in 1932 for the then Radio Austria [Lazarsfeld, 1974]. 4 ) Lazarsfeld was accepted but went to work only after his own condition was granted: that, even though the project be nominally located at Princeton, the actual work be done at his own social research institute in Newark. That was granted. The idea was of course to secure the existence of his little institute during and beyond the end of the Rockefeller project. 5 ) 3 ) This was already Lazarsfeld's third milk study in a pattern that was typical for his earlier years (and that was repeated, e.g., with topics such as "Unemployment," "Buying of Textiles" etc.): first a study by his Vienna Forschungsstelle (in this case one in 1933 for the Milk Consumption Board in Berlin) that provided the basic knowledge; then, while still a Rockefeller Fellow, participation, usually as an unpaid volunteer expert in an American study (in this case one by the Psychological Corpora· tion, done in 1935 for the New York Milk Board) that provided useful contacts; and finally a straight contract study in his own American institute (in this case the one cited above, done through his Re· search Institute in Newark) that was already part of his earning his living. 4 ) The report seems unfortunately lost. Lazarsfeld still gave a detailed account of it in 1973 (still quoting from an original copy-) in "Zwei Wege der Massenkommunikationsforschung" in Lazarsfeld [1974). 5 ) Lazarsfeld happened to be on a trip to Vienna, when Cantril's offer of the radio position reached him. In a long letter to Cantril he explained why it was so essential for him to keep his own Institute going: ... I invented the Research Center for two reasons. I wanted to direct a rather great variety of studies so that I was sure from year to year my methodological experience would increase - and that is, as you know, my main interest in research. And I tried to build up a group of younger students to be educated just in this kind of research procedure ... . . . it is probably not always possible to set up a Research Center. The University of Newark is certain· ly not an important place at this moment, but I feel rather certain that its Research Center can become important ten years from now. I would hate to see it collapse and I am sure it will if I drop it right now. You have to understand me in the right way: the Research Center does not need my work for the next years - what it needs is that I identify whatever I do in some way with its name ... (Continuation see page 21)

In Memoriam Paul F. Lazarsfeld

21

That piece offoresight proved even more consequential than he had anticipated. When after some time he could not get along with Cantril, he suggested with the support of Stanton that the project together with his little institute be moved to New York. Again Lynd got into the act, first persuading the President of Princeton to let the project go, then persuading Columbia to take it under its wing. At first the institute rented commercial facilities on Union Square but soon they were helped by getting free quarters in the already abandoned former building of the Columbia University Medical School. Due to an odd quirk in the building code, Columbia was still permitted to house them, but not to collect rent for housing them in an already abandoned building. 6 ) Lazarsfeld was permitted to give a course or two at the university without additional pay, while his salary came from the Rockefeller grant. The institute, by then renamed the "Office of Radio Research," was legally still an entity outside of the university proper and as such permitted to take on commercial and other contract research. Its employees were for the most part Columbia students of sociology and, by that time, after Hitler's take-over in Austria, also a number of Austrian and German refugees, whom Lazarsfeld thus helped to get started in America. Although these young students had not the same strong political engagement as those at the Forschungsstelle in Vienna, there was still a strong tendency for liberals to flock to the institute, in part because Paul Lazarsfeld's general political attitude was well known and in part because of the at least in those days generally liberal political inclination of many sociology students. That helped to recreate to a large extent the old informal work atmosphere, that I have described above - in short it was the cvmplete Vienna setup all over again. Let me quote Rose Goldsen once more, by the time when she spoke at the 20-year anniversary already herself a well established professor of sociology at Cornell: There was, then, the exhilaration that came from watching a creative thinker think, from rising to the occasion, from using yourself to your greatest capacity - even beyond your ... I feel strongly that I don't want to go ahead alone, that I want to stay for an institution which is able and willing to stand for me. And he adds in one of his most characteristic passages that encompasses a great deal of his efforts with all of his institutes, Vienna, Newark, New York: " ... as my poise and my past and my name cannot compare with yours, I try to identify whatever I do with an institution which might after some time acquire the dignity which I myself for reasons of destiny and may be of personality can hardly aspire at." And in a touching reference to Lynd, who had recommended him for the position, he adds: " ... if Robert Lynd advises me finally to accept the radio project, even if I have to drop Newark completely, I shall do it anyhow. After all I owe my whole American existence to him and to the fact that I always followed his leads and I shall not stop now ... " " ... you can understand, I am sure, that I don't like to lose the investments made so far and that I consider the situation after your project is over." (Letter to Cantril, August 8, 1937.) 6 ) Being housed in this marginal way - first in that abandoned brewery in Newark, now in this abandoned Medical School; in the end in a small apartment building owned by Columbia University, that was torn down within months after the Bureau itself had ceased to exist as a separate entity in 1977 - was not only symbolic for but fairly directly related to the perennially marginal position of Lazarsfeld's institutes on the edge of the university. To some extent it was also symbolic for his own marginal position through much of his life, that he commented on from time to time, especially in the "Memoir" [1968].

22

P. Neurath

own limitations. But it was more than that. It was doing these things in an atmosphere of intense emotional involvement, at a time when we were all young, full of energy, full of confidence, full of optimism, and - if I may say so - full of love. Let me insert here some reminiscences of my own. One has to do with the working climate in those early days. Once, in late 1941, when we had to meet a particularly difficult deadline - a major report was absolutely due the next day - practically the whole office stayed until ten at night. By eleven the ranks had thinned; a few diehards stayed until midnight. Lazarsfeld left as one of the last to catch a few hours of sleep in his nearby appartment. When he carne back and found me at my desk - I had worked the night through- he wanted to know: "What in heaven's name are you doing here at this time?'' At which point the coder asked the director: "You better tell me what you are doing here so early in the morning- it is only six o'clock!" Yet none of us would have thought, on this or other occasions, that for all this extra work we should receive extra pay - we all knew that the work had to be done and that there was no extra money in the till; but that the life of the institute might well depend on meeting this or some other catastrophic deadline. The second story may highlight Lazarsfeld's own thoughts about the role of all those commercial studies, especially those that really had no saving grace of social relevance to them. I happened to be in his office when a visitor made one of those snide remarks about those commercial studies, at which Lazarsfeld, suddenly stung, wheeled around, pointed at me and said: "If Paul Neurath here is ever going to amount to anything in social research, it will be because we could train him here with the money from those Bisodol (a stomach pill) and other studies." To which I can only add that years later, while directing studies in mass communication in India, with no mechanical equipment at my disposal, I looked back in gratitude at all those studies at the Office of Radio Research on which I could learn the mechanical side of the trade -hand-coding, hand-tabulating, and analyzing the results. In order to round out the picture of those earlier years, let me add a passage from Lipset's historical notes: To Lynd and to radical students like myself, however, the fact that Paul and his Bureau ... were so involved in market research, in studies supported by the radio networks, or advertising agencies, seemed like sell-outs. I must confess that I both accepted as true and repeated stories of the affluence which association with the Bureau and market research brought to those involved. In fact, as I was to discover some years later in the early 1950s, when I served as an Assistant Director of the Bureau, the organization was constantly in the red ... And Paul threw his consulting fees from private companies into the Bureau treasury to help reduce its steady deficits

[Lipset]. When, a year after the arrival of the institute at Columbia, a vacancy occurred in the Sociology Department through the sudden death of a full professor, opinions were divided about the replacement. One group led by Maciver wanted a theoretician - its candidate was the then still quite young and hardly known Robert Merton; another group led by Lynd wanted an empiricist - its candidate was Lazarsfeld. In the end a compromise gave each group what it wanted: Instead of one full professor, both men were appointed.

In Memoriam Paul F. Lazarsfeld

23

Lazarsfeld as the older one was made an associate and Merton as the younger was made an assistant professor [Lazarsfeld, 1975, p. 35;Mclver, p. 141]. The next development certainly came as a wholly unexpected surprise to both sides. Instead of acting as the protagonists of two opposing factions, Lazarsfeld and Merton became within a year fast friends; Lazarsfeld made Merton his co-director at the Office of Radio Research and with that the era Lazarsfeld-Merton began, that was then to dominate American sociology for well over twenty years - a beautiful example of what Merton later on was to call the "unanticipated consequences of planned social action." We don't have time to give a detailed account of how the institute, after a while renamed the "Bureau of Applied Social Research" or for short "The Bureau," branched out in all directions; how it eventually became the foremost center both of social research methodology and of research training, how countless publications, important books by the dozens and papers by the hundreds by Lazarsfeld and his many co-workers and people passing through the Bureau made it famous all over the world. But it still took several years until in 1945, upon the recommendation of a highly prestigious committee of mostly social science professors, that had been especially appointed for the occasion, the Bureau was accepted as an integral part of Columbia University. They even made the necessary changes in the by-laws of the University to enable the Bureau to continue financing itself with outside research contracts - commercial, governmental, philanthropical or otherwise. By that time, however, the idea of a university institute living primarily on outside contracts sounded no longer as outlandish as it did a few years before, when the institute first appeared on the scene. It was one of the by-products of the exigencies of the war, that the government needed enormous quantities of research done both in the natural and in the social sciences, that could not be arranged in any other way than through specific research contracts. That method of government financing through contract was continued afterwards for many years and exists in part still today. With that, empirical social research became at long last fully integrated and fully institutionalized as part and parcel not only of Columbia University but of American academic life in general, because similar institutes were established with the same or similar organizational arrangements especially during the immediate postwar era in or around numerous American and later also European universities. As to Lazarsfeld's personal share the chronist may report that in 1948 he went on a leave of absence for half a year to the University of Oslo, helping there also to get an institute of social research established. This was but the first assignment of this kind that he carried out in Europe upon which several others were still to follow, including his decisive part in helping to create this our own Institute here in Vienna. But on return from Oslo, he changed his position from leading director of the Bureau to Head of the Sociology Department. Although still staying on as one of several directors of the Bureau and a rather active one at that, he nevertheless found now more time to follow other pursuits, including that of studying the utilization of social research by governmental and other decisionmakers quite in line with the main theme of this conference. His systematic work in that direction dates, if a date can be set at all, from his Presidential address to the American Sociological Association in 1962, "The Sociology of Empirical Social Research" [Lazarsfeld, 1962]. From the suggestions then made resulted that

24

P. Neurath

huge volume "The Uses of Sociology" [1967] 7 ) and finally his last great research project, that it was not given to him to bring to completion. 8 ) His very last book "An Introduction to Applied Sociology" [Lazars[eld/ReitzjPasanella] published one year before his death was already an outgrowth of this last project. On reaching the official retirement age of 70, he continued working at Columbia on his books and projects as though he had never heard of the word. Ever the restless man in need of great activities, he accepted an appointment as Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, helping to set up their Program in Applied Sociology, and until the very end he commuted there once a week by plane to lecture, consult and to continue being Paul Lazarsfeld. When I once remarked to a colleague about this strenuous kind of retirement, I got the answer that encompassed it all: "Paul needs students." But now let me in conclusion go back once more w the beginnings and to a historic oddity on which Lazarsfeld especially in later years reflected more than once: Nowadays empirical social research, especially in its institutionalized form, is, for better or for worse, whether welcomed by some or decried by others, always considered a "typically American" import, when in re;tlity it was a Viennese export. Lazarsfeld had it already quite well developed here in his hometown when he took it with him on his more or less forced emigration, planted it in admittedly extremely fertile American soil, where it blossomed forth and then spread to many other places, including back to Vienna. But while it is often enough said, and usually rightly so, that "nemo propheta in patria," there are exceptions to this rule. That we are meeting here in Vienna today in memoriam Paul F. Lazarsfeld only goes to prove that they both are exceptions: Paul Lazarsfeld, who is being honored, and the city of Vienna, his home town, that does the honoring. To which, as a historical footnote I may add: And that is already the second time around. His home town really did not, as happens so often, wait with honoring him until he was gone. I recall the deep glow of satisfaction with which he once described to me the occasion when he received his Honorary Doctorate at the University of Vienna. It was fitting then and it is fitting today that we think of him not only as a man of great accomplishments but even more so as what he designated himself once in his memoir: A "connecting cog" between the American and the European tradition. In his own words: "Most of the things I did would have come about anyhow. Still, intellectual transportation needs carriers, and it

7 ) A 900-page volume of over 30 papers, all written specifically for this volume. In the 25-page Introduction, largely written by Lazarsfeld, he anticipates much of the theme of our conference. Citing two questions from the suggestions that went to the designated authors of the papers he writes: "What are the difficulties of translating practical issues into research problems?" "What are the unavoidable intellectual gaps between research findings and advice for action?" And he adds: "The collaboration or lack of collaboration between client and sociologist is the central focus of this volume" [Lazarsfeld, 1967). 8 ) That was a large project supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research (that did, however, have nothing whatsoever to do with any specific problems of the Navy). Its working title was "The Utilization Project." Lazarsfeld undertook it largely because he was not satisfied that the "Uses of Sociology" had really answered the questions asked above. At the time of his death in 1976 there existed already about one dozen mimeographed reports, some of book length, others the equivalents of hefty brochures. Some had Lazarsfeld as co-author [e.g., LazarsfeldjMcDonald), for others he had written the preface.

In Memoriam Paul F. Lazarsfeld

25

was my good luck that I was one of them" [Lazarsfeld, 1968, p. 271 ). And, let me add, it was also our good luck, that he was one of them, and in a way that is the deeper meaning of it, when here and now we do honor to his memory.

Addendum Austria is honoring Paul Lazarsfeld in yet another way: With the help of the Bundesministerium flir Wissenschaft und Forschung a Paul F Lazarsfe/d Archive is being established at the University of Vienna. That archive is not meant as a dead collection of memorabilia and papers, but as an active place of work where the collected materials {papers, correspondence, both by Lazarsfeld and from his general sphere of influence) will be organized, catalogued and indexed so that they can serve as the basis for scientific work, including dissertations, etc., perhaps developing further ideas and lines of thought that he began, but that it was not given to him to finish. Friends, co-workers and students are invited to send suitable materials - especially correspondence - either in the original or in xerox copy either to the Lazarsfeld Archive in Vienna or to Paul Neurath in New York 9 ). The Archive can cover xeroxing and shipping costs.

References Brown, E. F., and P.F. Lazarsfeld: Dislike of Milk among Young People. Development of a Method to Measure and Analyze this Dislike. Mimeographed, 1936. Craig, D., and P.F. Lazarsfeld: Some Measurement of the Acceptance and Rejection of Rayon by Pittsburgh Women: An Experimental Study of 600 Consumers. American Society for Testing Materials (Rayon). Mimeographed, 1934. Essex County Superintendent of Schools and the Research Center at the University of Newark: Soda! Trends in Essex County. Newark, N.J., January, February and May 1938. Greffrath, M.: Die Zerstorung einer Zukunft. Gespriiche mit emigrierten Sozialwissenschaftlcrn. Rcinbek 1979, 103-144. Jahoda, M., P.F. Lazarsfeld and H. Zeisel: Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal. Ein soziographischer Vcrsuch iiber die Wirkungen langdauernder Arbeitslosigkeit. Leipzig 1933. - : American Edition: Marienthal, The Sociography of an Unemployed Community. Chicago 1971. Lazarsfeld, P.F.: Ober die Perihelbewegung des Merkur aus der Einstein 'schcn Gravitationsthcorie. Zeitschriftf. Physik 35,1925,119-128. -: Statistisches Praktikum flir Psychologen und Lehrer. Jena 1929. -:An Unemployed Village. Character and Personality 1/2, 1932, 147-151. -:The Sociology of Empirical Social Research. American Sociological Review 27, 1962, 757 767. - : The Uses of Sociology. New York 1967. 9 ) Paul F. Lazarsfeld Archiv, Institut f. Sozio Iogie, Alserstr P.

1. It might be objected that 'Pis false' is not value-neutral. But if it is not value-neutral, then the value-judgment 'Pis false' can be derived from premisses concerning the lack of correspondence, or mismatch, of objects and beliefs (in the object domain). Moreover as, assuming that such judgments are intrinsic to any factual discourse, we are nevertheless able to infer from them, together with explanatory premisses, conclu5 ) An explanatory critique in the natural sciences could be represented as follows: I.S.l' (i)T>P. (ii)Texpl(PN)-(iii)-V(Ss--+l(PN))_... (iv)V()_8 s

Scientific Explanation and Human Emancipation

43

sions of a type which are not intrinsic to every factual discourse (viz. those specified in (iii) and (iv)), we do have a transition here that goes against the grain of Burne's Law, however precisely that is supposed to be here interpreted or applied. On the other hand, if 'Pis false' is value-neutral, then the inferences to •p ought not be believed (CP)' and 'Don't believe (act upon) P (CP)' certainly seem inescapable. 2. The suggestion that science itself presupposes, or embodies commitment to, certain values, such as objectivity, openness, integrity, honesty, veracity, consistency, coherence, comprehensibility, explanatory power, etc. should certainly be welcomed- suggesting, as it does, that the class of the 'value-neutral' is as empty as that of Austin's original 'constatives' [see Austin, esp. p. 30]. But it does nothing either to rescue Burne's Law, or to deny the validity of inference-types (iii) and (iv), which turn on the special feature of the sciences of beliefs that commitment to truth and explanatory power entail the search for theories which will possess value-implications that cannot be regarded as conditions of, or as already implicit as anticipations in the organisation of, scientific-activity-in-general. 3. It might be maintained that, although inference-type (iii) is valid, (iv) is faulty, so that no commitment to any sort of action is entailed by the critical explanatory theory. But this is not so. For one can reason straight away to action directed at removing the sources of false consciousness, providing of course one has good ground for supposing that it would do so, that no ill (or sufficiently overriding ill) effects would be forthcoming and that there is no better course of action which would achieve the same end. Of course the inference scheme does not itself, conceived as a philosophical reconstruction, determine what such practical ('critical-revolutionary') action is: that is the task of substantive theory. Of course 'remove (annul, defuse, disconnect, dissolve, transform) sources of false consciousness' does not specify what the sources are, any more than 'lying is wrong' says which statements are lies. Behind this objection, however, lie two considerations of some moment. First, the kind of theory underpinning (iv) may be different from that informing (iii). Diagnosis is not therapy. We may know that something is causing a problem without knowing how to get rid of or change it. Secondly, an explanatory critique of this type does not in general specify how we are to act after the source of mystification (false consciousness) is removed. It focuses on action which 'frees' us to act, by eliminating or disconnecting a source of mystification acting as an unwanted source of (co-)determination, replacing that source with another wanted (or perhaps just less unwanted) one, so achieving (absolute or relative) liberation from one stream of constraints or compulsions inherited from, as the causalities (and casualties) of the past. But it does not tell us what to do, if and when (and to the extent that) we are free. Thus emancipated action may, and perhaps must, have a different logical form from emancipatory action. The human sciences, then, must make judgments of truth and falsity, in virtue of their explanatory charter. And these, in the context of explanatory theories, entail value-judgments of type (iii) and (iv). Mutatis mutandis similar considerations apply to judgments of rationality, consistency, coherence, etc. Thus I.S.l can be generalised in the cognitive direction represented in I.S.2 below, where C (P) stands for the contradictory character of some determinate set of beliefs.

44

R. Bhaskar

1.8.2 T > P.

T exp C (P) _.,.- V (S __. C (P)) __. Vf/J -S.

But the human sciences are of course not only concerned to explain what might be called 'cognitive ills'. Their manifest includes the explanation of the 'practical ills' of ill-health, misery, repression, etc.; and in between such ills and the cognitive ones, what might be called the communicative ills of deception (including self-deception), distortion, etc. This indicates two further lines of consideration. First I.S.1 can be straightforwardly generalised to deal with the explanation of such non-cognitive ills, with a corresponding deduction of value-judgments, as in I.S.3 below, where I - H stands for ill-health. 1.8.3 Texpi- H. - V(I- H)__.- V(S __.I- H)_.,. Vf/J_s· However, as will be immediately obvious, this deduction, despite its evident social and epistemic power, is now no longer from purely factual premisses, or from what is immediately or self-evidently constitutive of purely factual discourse. And so it cannot be used to achieve a formal refutation of Hume's Law. It is precisely on this rock that most previous attempts at its refutation, including Searle's notorious attempted derivation of an 'ought' from the rather tenuous institution of 'promising' [Searle, 1964, 1969 Chap. 8], have broken. But further reflection shows another possibility here: namely that there are non-cognitive conditions, such as a degree of good health and the absence of marked asymetries in political, economic and the other modalities of power, for discourse (including factual discourse) in general to be possible. If this is correct then a formal derivation of an 'ought' can proceed as in I.S.4 below: 1.8.4 T> P.

Texp (I- H _.,.I (P)) __.- V (S _.,.I- H)__. Vf/J_s·

Is there a sense in which 1.8.1 and 2 are epistemically prior to their non-cognitive generalisations? Yes, in as much as empirically-controlled retroduction to explanatory structures always occurs in the context of, and typically (in science) assumes the form of, criticism of beliefs (consciousness)- scientific, proto-scientific, lay and practical.

7. Depth Rationality

Level V: Depth-Explanatory Critical Rationality The most thoroughly explored applications of 1.8.1 and 2 involve the phenomena of psychological rationalisation and ideological mystification. These phenomena are characterised by two distinctive features. First, a doubling of necessity between misrepresentation (P) and source (S); so that the, or some such, misrepresentation is not only causally necessitated by, but causally necessary for, the persistence or modulation, reproduction or limited (non-essential) transformation of its source. Secondly, an internal relationship between source (S) and object (O); so that the misrepresented object is either the same as, or at least causally dependent upon, the source of the misrepresentation. Thus, in a simple depth-psychological model, an agent N may misdecribe his real (i.e. the causally efficacious) reason, s, for some action, l/1, by p. If pis itself a contingently necessary releasing condition for l/1 and s itself generates, in context, p then we have:

s _.,. p. sp _.,. l/1.

(5)

Scientific Explanation and Human Emancipation

45

To explain this we now posit a structureS such that 1/1 is (perhaps contingently) necessary for its persistence or modulation, as in (6) S-+(s-+p. sp-+1/J)-+S'. Givens =f. p the deductions proceed as in I.S.l. This paradigm may be easily extended to include 'outer' as well as 'inner' causes, including the self-mystification of forms of social life, or systems of social relations, in ideologies. Thus the contradictions which mystify Colletti [1975] tum simply on the necessary co-existence in social reality of an object and a (categorially) false presentation of it, where it is the inner (or essential) structure of the object which generates the categorially false presentation (or appearance). Schema (7) is isomorphic with (5):

E-+A. EA-+P;

(7)

and (8) is isomorphic with (6):

(8) R-+(E-+A. EA-+P)-+R 1 , 1 where E =essence, A = appearance, P =practices, and R, R the modulated reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. Are there any general conditions on the internal structure (E) of a self-reproducing system (7) which generates and contains within itself (i.e. 1) a functionally necessary misrepresentation (A) of itself? It seems plausible to suppose that E must possess at least sufficient internal differentiation to justify attributing to it a 'Spaltung' or split; and that if T is to be capable of endogenous (essential) transformation, rather than merely modulated reproduction, the split must constitute, or be constituted by, antagonistic (opposed) tendencies. But apart from the Colletti-style contradiction built into the notion of the system's misrepresentation of itself, it seems a priori unlikely that what the human sciences may empirically discover about the various structural sources of false consciousness will justify the application of a single, unified category of 'contradiction' to those structures. Instead one might conjecture a galaxy of concepts of contradiction, clustered around the core notion of the axiological indeterminancy generated by the logical archetype (together with the evaluative connotations this secretes). The specific concepts of contradiction would then achieve their individuation in the constraints they impose upon such indeterminancy and in their thematisation of its form. Perhaps the most famous depth-explanation, Marx's Capital, has the structure of a triple critique: of theories, of the practical consciousness such theories reflect or rationalise, and of the conditions explaining such consciousness. But in Marx, and the Marxian tradition generally, the criticised (discursive and practical) consciousness is regarded not just as false but as 'ideological'- where 'ideology' is counterposed to 'science'. In addition to the critical and explanatory conditions, one thus fmds a further set of categorial conditions. Here beliefs are typically criticised for their unscientificity simpliciter, or for their inadequacy in sustaining the (irreducible) specificity of the subject matter of their domains. Thus in reification, fetishism, hypostatisation, voluntaristic conventionalism, organicism, etc. social life is presented, in one way or another, in an a-social mode- a condition rooted, for Marx, in the alienation and atomisation characteristic of capitalism as a specific form of class society. For example, on Marx's analysis, the wage-form collapses a

46

R. Bhaskar

power (labour-power) to its exercise (labour), the domain of the real to the actual, while the value-form fetishistically represents social relations in the guise of natural qualities. The critique of these gross categorial errors could be represented as: I.S.9 T>P. Texpi(P). Texp-Sc (P)--+-V(S--+-Sc. I(P))--+ VfP.s; and I.S.10 T> P. Texp I (P). Texp -S0 (P)--+ -V (S--+ -S0 . I (P))--+ VfP.s, where -Sc and -S0 stand for the unscientific and desocialising character of the forms in question. What are we to make of Engels' celebrated rebuke to Lefargue: "Marx rejected the 'political, social and economic ideal' you attributed to him. A man of science has no ideals, he elaborates scientific results, and if he is also politically committed, he struggles for them to be put into practice. But if he has ideals, he cannot be a man of science, since he would then be biased from the start" (11th August 1884 )? While interests both predispose and motivate analyses (and their acceptance/rejection) in the human sciences, so that Engels' scientific repudiation of the V--+ F connection is disingenuous; it remains the case that no value judgments other than those already bound up in the assessment of the cognitive power of Marx's theory are necessary for the derivation of a negative evaluation of the capitalist mode of production (CP) and a positive evaluation of action rationally oriented towards it,.s transformation (CP) - so that the political commitment that Engels attributed to Marx as, so to speak, a contingent extra can (on the assumption that Marx's depth-explanation is correct) be logically grounded in his scientific practice alone. Of course the theories now required to confirm, extend, develop or refute Marx's own analyses can only be consequent upon engagement in investigations of comparable scope and penetration.

Level VI: Depth Rationality Given that clear paradigms exist in the human sciences of I.S.l-4, most notably in the traditions inaugurated by Marx and Freud but also in some of the work of the theorists of the life-world of social interaction, is there a sense in which the application of these inference schemes, and hence of the type of explanatory critique they presuppose, is transcendentally necessary? Now assume two interlocutors X and Y. Suppose X believes himself to possess a rational argumentative procedure RA, a reasoned argument A, and a conclusion Q; but that Y does not or cannot (perhaps 'in spite of himself') accept or act upon RA, A or Q. (The reverse conditions may apply symmetrically to X, but we can ignore this complication here.) What is to be done when rational argument fails? Clearly there are three general kinds of possibility here: (i) Y continues to mistakenly believe (and act upon)- Q; (ii) some non-discursive process (e.g. force, medication) induces in Ya belief in Q; or (iii) X and Y jointly initiate an inquiry into the conditions blocking or compelling Y's beliefs. Adoption of solution (i), i.e. stoic acceptance of irrationality, error, etc. is a counsel of despair. Moreover it cannot be generalised to the first person case of doubt (or more gen-

Scientific Explanation and Human Emancipation

47

erally, choice) without vicious axiological regress. Solution (ii) can be ruled out on the grounds that drugs, force, etc. can only simulate the acceptance of A or RA. Further it is not emancipatory, in that it does not replace an unwanted with a wanted source of determination, but merely counteracts the effects of one unwanted source of determination with another. This has the corollary that in as much as the original source of determination is not defused, it may continue to exercise a latent power. The alternative (iii) of a depth-investigation (D-1) is possible where reason fails but has not yet exhausted its resources; and it is practicable where Y's beliefs are generated or underpinned by unreflected (unacknowledged) processes, and Y seeks to understand, in order to undermine or abrogate, these processes. A depth-investigation may be defined generally as any co-operative inquiry, which includes the agent, into the structure of some presumed set of mechanisms, constituting for that agent an unwanted source of determination (which, whether cognitive or not, will always possess some cognitive manifestation), with a view to initiating, preserving or restoring that agent's ability to act and think rationally. Four points must be immediately made about this definition. First, what is rational cannot be stipulated a priori, but must itself be discovered, in relation to antecedent notions of rationality (its nominal essences, so to speak), in the context of the explanatory critique such a depth-investigation presupposes. Secondly, although the concept of a depth-investigation has been introduced as an ideographic practically-oriented application of some or other determinate explanatory critique, the theory at the heart of the critique itself depends crucially for its own development and empirical confirmation on such investigations (whether on living or reconstructed, e.g. historical, materials). It follows from this that the links between theory and practice, and between pure and applied research, though not abrogating their distinctions, are bound to be tighter than in the natural sciences. Thirdly, corresponding to the different types of inference scheme outlined above, there will be different forms of depth-investigation. These must not, however, be hypostatised. For of course the explanation of cognitive ills will in general involve reference to practical and communicative ills, and vice versa. Finally the desire for emancipation which motivates the depth-investigation can neither be posited a priori (for although it is a necessary truth that people act on their wants, it is not a necessary truth that they act on their interests), nor predicted in historicist fashion on the basis of some particular theory of individual development or history. But as a socially-produced social object, the desire for emancipation will of course be a crucial topic for meta-investigations. And such investigations will need to be continually reflexively incorporated into the substantive theory of the practice etc. from or for which emancipation is sought. The structure of a simplified D-1 may be elucidated as follows: (I) (2) (3)

Y is not capable of f/J; scientific realism suggests there is a mechanism M preventing this. General theory T investigates the structure of blocking/compelling mechanisms, under the control of empirical data and researches. The application ofT to Y depends upon the agent Y, as well as X. For it is Y's interpretations, actions and determinations that are at issue. Subjectivity in the human sciences is not an obstacle; it is (an essential part of) the datum. But onto-

48

R. Bhaskar

logical authorship does not automatically carry over into epistemological authority. Now the Y-dependence of the D-I means that Y must have a motive or interest in disengaging M, or in a range of acts that M prevents. And that co-investigator X must not have an interest in the distortion of M-descriptions. Concretely, this raises the questions of the costs of emancipation for Y and of the conditions under which emancipation may be a second-best solution for Y; and for X it presupposes both the willingness to learn (in the general spirit of Marx's 'Third Thesis on Feuerbach') and the continuing development of X's own self-understanding. At a deeper level, the success of the detailed investigation of the modus operandi of M in or for X must depend upon an internal differentiation within the experience of X, so that the empiricist/utilitarian notion of emancipation as a process of the alteration of the circumstances of atomistic individuals must be rejected. Moreover it should be reiterated that cognitive emancipation will in general depend upon non-cognitive (and extra-discursive) conditions; and that cognitive emancipation is necessary, but insufficient, for full emancipation (as shown by the example of the slave who knows very well he is a slave but still remains a slave, i.e. unfree). In fact dissonance, not liberation, may be the immediate result of enlightenment. And such dissonance may lead either to 'revolutionary-critical' activity or to despair. Moreover constraints upon cognitive emancipation itself are imposed by the pre-formation of thought-contents (in psycho-analysis), the projects of others (in social phenomenology) and the non-discursive aspects of social reality (in historical materialism). Hence emancipation cannot be conceived either as an internal relationship within thought (the idealist error) or as an external relationship of 'educators', 'therapists' or 'intellectuals' to the 'educated', 'sick' or 'oppressed' (the empiricist error). Now I want to propose that the possibility of a depth-investigation is a transcendental condition for any science of man and hence (at a remove) for any science at all; and that in particular to inquire into the nature of the real grounds for beliefs is the same thing as to inquire into the possibility of rationalisation, selfdeception, deception of others, counterfinality and systemic mystification; and that to inquire into the conditions of possibility of these cognitive-communicative malaises immediately raises the question of the conditions of the possibility of the practical ones - from ill-health to brutal oppression. The issue of the causes of belief and action, presupposing a distinction between real and possible (including assumed or fancied) grounds, can only be taken up the depth human sciences. But a moment's reflection shows that this distinction, and hence the possibility of a depth-investigation at the analytic, phenomenological and historical levels, is a condition of every rational praxis or authentic act of self-understanding at all. It is necessitated by the existential intransitivity and enabled by the causal interdependency of the phenomena of sociality. Thus in the human sciences the problem of error (oppression, etc.) must make way for the problem of the causes of error (oppression, etc.), as part of the programme, paramorphic (but non-identical) to that of Kepler, Galileo and Newton, of the investigation of the underlying structures producing the manifest phenomena of social life. The object of the depth-investigation is emancipation. Emancipation may be conceived either as the process of the changing of one mode of determination D, into another D 2 ,

Scientific Explanation and Human Emancipation

49

or as the act of switching from D 1 to D 2 , both D 1 and D2 perduring but D 1 in an inactivated condition. Now if the emancipation is to be of the human species, then the powers of emancipated man must already exist (although perhaps only as powers to acquire or develop powers) in an unactualised state. The key questions for substantive theory then become: what are the conditions for the actualisation of the powers?: are they stimulating (of the socialist tradition); or releasing (of the anarchic/liberal traditions)?; do they lie in social organisation or individual attitudes etc. ?6 )

8. Conclusion Can anything be said about the conditions of the possibility of emancipatory practices in general? I think that, for emancipation to be possible, four general types of condition must be satisfied. First, reasons must be causes, or discourse is ontologically redundant (and scientifically inexplicable). But the potentially emancipatory discourse, given the T.M.S.A. and the general conception of an open world, can only co-determine action in an already prestructured, practical and collective context. Second, values must be immanent (as latent or partially manifested tendencies) in the practices in which we engage, or normative discourse is utopian or idle. I think that Marx, in conceiving socialism as anticipated in the revolutionary practice of the proletariat, grasped this. And it is on this feature that Habermas' deduction of speech-constitutive universals also turns [Habermas, 1970]. But if there is a sense in which the ideal community, founded on principles of truth, freedom and justice, is already present as an anticipation in every speech inter-action, might one not be tempted to argue that equality, liberty and fraternity are present in every transaction or material exchange; or that respect and mutual recognition are contained in the most casual reciprocated glance? [cf. Harre, 1979]. It is an error to suppose that ethics must have a linguistic foundation;just as it is an error to suppose that it can be autonomous from science or history. Third, critique must be internal to (and conditioned by) its objects; or it will lack both epistemic grounding and causal power. But it follows from this that it is part of the very process it describes, and so subject to the same possibilities, of unreflected determination and historical supercession, it situates. Hence continuing self-reflexive auto-critique is the sine qua non of any critical explanatory theory. 6) Is the present direction of argument necessarily incompatible with a substantive utilitarian ethics? Yes and no. The utilitarian tradition has generally been willing to concede that a world with more possibilities is CP better than one with less, so that supposing that a happy or healthy man could make himself miserable or ill (not that he would - in virtue of his state - of course normally want to) but not vice versa, Bentham and Mill would be bound, on this kind of ground alone, to approve an emancipated as better than a non-emancipated state. But could they approve the kind of measures substantive depth theories indicate as necessary for the transition to such states? I doubt it. In Kantia~ terms, one could say that although they might will the end, it is highly unlikely that they could will the means in all but the most improbable circumstances.

50

R. Bhaskar

Finally, for emancipation to be possible, knowable emergent laws must operate (see Bhaskar, 1982b ]. Such laws, which will of course be consistent with physical laws, will be set in the context of explanatory theories elucidating the structures of cognitive and noncognitive oppression and the possibility of their transformation by women and men. Emancipation depends upon the untruth of reductionist materialism and spiritualistic idealism alike. On reductionism- if the physical process level is Lp, and the level at which emancipation is sought isLe, then either Lp completely determines Le and no qualitative change is possible; or qualitative change is possible, and the laws of Lp are violated. On idealism - either emancipation is entirely intrinsic to thought, in which case it is unconditioned and irrationality is inexplicable; or if it is conditioned, it cannot be intrinsic to thought. Emancipation depends upon explanation depends upon emergence. Given the phenomenon of emergence, an emancipatory politics or therapy depends upon a realist science. But, if and only if emergence is real, the development of both are up to us. The possibility of emancipation is not of course the reason why an emergent powers theory, if it is, is true. It is rather that if human beings, and social forms in general, are emergent from but conditioned by nature then there is at least the possibility that the human sciences, provided they "do not anticipate the new world dogmatically, but rather seek to find the new world through criticism of the old" [Marx, p. 212], could still be of some benefit to the greater majority of mankind.

References Achinstein, P.: Explanation. American Philosophical Quarterly. Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Ed. by N. Rescher. Oxford 1969. Austin, J.: Performative - Constantive. Philosophy and Ordinary Language. Ed. by C. Caton, trans!. by G.J. Warnock. Urbana 1963. Bhaskar, R.: A Realist Theory of Science. 1st ed., Leeds 1975; 2nd ed. Brighton, N.J., 1978. - : On the Possibility of Social Scientific Knowledge and the Limits of Naturalism. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 8 (1 ), 197 8. - : The Possibility of Naturalism. Brighton, N.J., 1979a. - : On the Possibility of Social Scientific Knowledge and the Limits of Naturalism (Reprint). Issues in Exercise Philosophy III. Ed. by I. Morpham and D.H. Ruben. Brighton, N.J., 1979b. - : Realism in the Natural Sciences. Logic, Methodology and Philosphy of Science VI. Ed. by L.J. Cohen eta!. Amsterdam 1982a. - : Emergence, Explanation and Emancipation. Explaining Social Behaviour. Ed. by P. Secord. London 1982b. Bernstein, R.: The Reconstruction of Social and Political Theory. Oxford 1976. Bloor, D.: Knowledge and Social Imagery. London 1962. Colletti, L.: Marxism and the Dialectic. New Left Review 93, 1975. Collier, A.: Materialism and Explanation. Issues in Marxist Philosophy II. Ed. by I. Mepham and D.H. Ruben. Brighton 1979.

Scientific Explanation and Human Emancipation

51

Edgley, R.: Reason as Dialectic. Radical Philosophy 15, 1976.

- : Marx's Revolutionary Science. Issues in Marxist Philosophie III. Ed. by J. Mepham and D.H. Ruben. Brighton 1979. Elster, J.: Logic and Society. Chichester 1978. Gadamer, H.-G.: Truth and Method. London 1975. Gibbs, B.: Freedom and Liberation. Sussex 1976. Giddens, A.: New Rules of Sociological Method. London 1976. - : Central Problems in Social Theory. London 1979. Habermas, J.: Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence. Inquiry 13, 1970. - : Knowledge and Human Interests. London 1972. - : Theory and Practice. London 1974. Hanson, N.R.: Patterns of Discovery. Cambridge 1958. Hare, R.: Freedom and Reason. Oxford 1963. Harr~, R.: The Principles of Scientific Thinking. London 1970. - : Social Being. Oxford 1979. Hegel, G. W.F.: The Phenomenology of Mind. London 1949. Hesse, M.B.: The Structure of Scientific Inference. London 1974. Hume, D.: A Treatise on Human Nature. Ed. by L.A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford 1965. Macintyre, A.: Hume on "is" and "ought". Philosophical Review, 1959. -: Against the Self-Images of the Age. London 1971. Marx, E.: Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society. Ed. by Easton and E. Guddat. New York 1967. Marx, K.: Capital. Vol. I. London 1965. - : The German Ideology. Ed. by C. Arthur. London 1974. Polanyi, M.: Personal Knowledge. London 1958 Scriven, M.: Truism as the Grounds for Historical Explanation. Theories of History. Ed. by P. Gardiner. New York 1959. Searle, J.: How to Derive "Ought" from "Is". Philosophical Review, 1964. -: Speech Acts. Cambridge 1969. Taylor, C.: Neutrality in Political Science. Philosophy, Politics and Society, 3rd Series. Ed. by P. Laslett and W. Runeiman. Oxford 1969. - : Interpretation and the Science of Man. Review of Metaphysics 25 (3 ), 1971. - : Neutrality in Political Science (Reprint). The Philosophy of Social Explanation. Ed. by A. Ryan. Oxford 1973. - : Interpretation and the Sciences of Man (Reprint). Critical Sociology. Ed. by P. Connerton. Harmondsworth 1976. Ullman-Margalit, E.: The Emergence of Norms. Oxford 1977.

Realizing Social Science Knowledge. 1983 © Physica-Verlag, Wien-Wiirzburg.

Objectivity and Endurance: On Some Evaluative Criteria for Social Science Knowledge 1 ) By R. Reichardt, Vienna 2 )

1. Objectivity and the Political Realization of Social Science Knowledge Circularity is a pervasing situation in epistemological problems. An important variety of circularity is found in the social sciences: The researcher can be considered as being part of the object which he intends to study, namely the society. Influences in both directions - from society to the researcher and from the researcher to society - exist and may destroy the notion of objective knowledge. A recent formulation of this problem is found in Becker's writings [ 1970, p. 23]: "We can never avoid taking sides, so we are left with the question of whether taking sides means that some distortion is introduced into our work so great as to make it useless." My point now is that we would go wrong as social scientists being too close to as well as being too far from the "object" of our investigations. This is relevant, to my opinion, also to political realizations of our knowledge. In order to explain this, let me use a metaphorical description: Jacques, Alain, Pierre and Bob know each other through years of friendship. Whereas the first three boys speak French as their maternal language and poorly English, Bob speaks both languages fluently. Now a newcomer, Dick, joins the group for a long vacation trip. He speaks English as maternal language and very little French. As we may expect, Bob gives Dick an overview of the situation and many hints about the three French boys. (The reader will certainly remark that we have given in the three-person game, as may be depicted the political application situation, Dick the role of the "user", Bob the role of the "scientist" and Jacques, Alain and Pierre the role of the "population".) Now, from the point of view of Dick, it would be detrimental, if Bob would be too close to the three French boys, as then he might give an over-idealized, or anyhow a distorted picture of their characters. On the other hand, would Bob be too far from them, he could not really understand them. He has to enter into real interactions, share interests with them and develop his own emotional attitudes towards them, should he be a good 1 ) The article is a revised version of a paper given at the Vienna Conference. The partly critical comment given by J. O'Neill at this occasion showed me that some of my ideas did not come out clearly enough and that the parts on "endurance" would deserve a thorough clarification. To this end, the article was, in some parts, completely rewritten. The reader should keep in mind that J. O'Neill's comment as publisher in this volume is based on the older version of this paper and not on this revised one. 2 ) Robert Reichardt. Dept. of Sociology, University of Vienna, Alserstraf.\e 33, A-1080 Vienna.

Objectivity and Endurance

53

guide for Dick's future living within the group. And, by the same token, the French boys are speculating about what Bob will tell Dick about them, respectively, they simply react to that part of Bob's utterings which are accessible and understandable for them. This is a dilemma, as involvement with the object as well as non-involvement are necessary. We are not facing here a linear scale between "close" and "far" from the object, and the resolution does not consist in finding the right point of a well-tempered sympathy on this scale. The problem is more fundamental for the social sciences. The above considerations do not, of course, apply solely to situations in which the social scientist stands vis-~-vis a user of his knowledge. Weiss [ 1977, p. 1] remarks: "We do not hold that the only, or even necessarily major, function of social science research is to aid in policy making." The problem poses itself as well for the social scientist who is guided only by scientific curiousity or by the standards of his professional community. A person who, as did Kierkegaard, defmes himself/herself as a "spy of God", might even put a metaphysical court in the role of the "user". On the other hand, the instrumental aspect of objectivity cannot be overlooked. Mayntz ( 1977, p. 57] holds " ... that the objective validity (or scientific truth) of scientific statements is not merely a value in itself, but has a largely instrumental function in securing its acceptance -that is, social consensus." Now, let us dwell for a while on this metaphorical example: What would make Bob a valuable consultant in the eyes of Dick? There are two factors: (1) Bob is neither just an executor of Jacques', Allain's and Pierre's intentions, nor is he a sycophant who only tries to flatter Dick. (We may call this the "objectivity-aspect".) (2) Bob's advice is of enduring importance for Dick. In this sense, he could not be replaced or made superfluous for Dick. (We may call this the "endurance-aspect".) I am claiming now that these two factors derived from our metaphorical story are just two essential aspects of what may be called valuable social science knowledge in general. We may identify this notion with a scientific attitude striving for a resolution of the circularity-problem mentioned in the introduction, a problem which, however, can only be solved asymptotically. Before we go into details, we should distinguish two facets of the endurance-factor. Bob's advisory job vis-~-vis Dick may have lasting effects either because his account of the French boys' characteristics was so complete and accurate as to embrace quite a host of possible future situations and thus remaining useful over a longer period of time, in short: Bob has a good "theory", or Bob has a methodological tool (in our case the French language) allowing him to grasp time and again Jacques', Alain's and Pierre's behavioral tendencies even in the case of the latters evolving psychologically in unforeseen ways. We have now the following scheme for "valuable knowledge" in the social sciences:

(1)

objectivity

(2)

endurance